


Soulmark

by inK_AddicTion



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Age Difference, F/F, Human AU, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Polyamory, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-10-15 03:45:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10549526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inK_AddicTion/pseuds/inK_AddicTion
Summary: In a world where living without your soulmate leaves you incomplete, Yellow Diamond is born with three soulmarks and a lot of questions.





	1. Green

**Author's Note:**

> Art of young Blue and Yellow done by the talented https://papersketch.tumblr.com/ used with permission!

Yellow is born seeing in shades of gold, with buttercup yellow eyes and three soulmarks. The marks are young, of course - there’s a blue splotch on her skinny chest, a pink blur on her right ankle, and a phrase, sometimes words, printed on the back of her neck in a neat, stylish hand, all in grey.

She is too young to understand the muttering of the doctors as they rush back and forward over her cradle, snapping photographs and running tests on the marks developing clearly on skin too young for scars. Her mother looks worried, asks about defects, is quizzed about drugs she took while pregnant. They stay in hospital for over three weeks. On her medical file there is a pitying note written by a nurse who went home and cried about a doomed child who looked in the physical pinnacle of health.

Three is so highly unusual to be almost never heard of; everyone is sure that she is broken, that she will never find her proper life companion. The soulless are seen as creatures of abject pity and fear.

To Yellow, the marks are the only indication of colours other than her namesake that she has. She looks at the pink blotch on her foot and compares it against the endless wheat coloured grass, flowers all the colours of sunflowers and dandelions, as if the whole world has been dripped and slathered in honey, oversaturated, bright, brilliant. She imagines whole skies the colour of the blue mark on her chest, sometimes a wobbly splotch with undefined edges, sometimes a child’s portrait of a cat, sometimes a messy handprint, like her soulmate has just stamped a hand in paint just underneath Yellow’s skinny neck.

She is five when she discovers that having three soul marks makes her different, because everyone else in her new nursery only has one. In fact, Yellow is only allowed to spend half an hour there before one of the nursery teachers notices the words peeking out above her T-shirt’s neck, marching obliviously up to the child’s innocent hairline.

“We do not tolerate  _profanity_ from pre-schoolers,” the nursery teacher scolds Yellow’s mother furiously.

Yellow stands nearby, head down, not looking at the other kids gathering round for the show, the back of her neck raw and abraded from when the nursery teacher has scrubbed relentlessly at skin. The words are still there, of course, harsh and black and angry, sunken into her skin like poisonous claws. No one apart from the nursery teacher knows French, but the words have the anger of a curse, and Yellow can feel the despair, like an ache, sinking into the bone.

 _‘Fucking kill me,’_ one of her soulmates has written, across space and strangerhood, into her flesh.

“It’s her mark, it’s one of her marks,” Yellow’s mother tries her best to explain, “this one has always been the most developed – it didn’t say that when I brought her here this morning, look-“

 _“One of her marks?”_ The nursery teacher exclaims.

Like all good mothers, Yellow’s keeps a careful photo diary of her soulmarks’ progression. Unlike most mothers, she doesn’t share hers. She brings up the appropriate photo on her phone, only three days old. Clearly visible, the mark is in the shape of a snowy white hawk, lovingly drawn, deeply detailed, in all shades of monochrome.

Yellow is still removed from the nursery. She holds hands with her furiously embarrassed and humiliated mother, sweating under the heat of the scarf wrapped thickly around her neck, wishing she could go back to the cool nursery, with the sandpit she’d only just got the chance to investigate. She pulls towards the park as they pass, gazing longingly at sunny children playing behind gold bars.

“Please?” she asks, quietly, “park, mummy?”

Her mother looks down at her, probably wanting to get home and put the embarrassment behind her. But her usually rambunctious child is quiet, still somewhat shamefaced from a telling off that she doesn’t understand, and her mother cannot bring herself to say no. They go inside, and her mother pushes her on the swings, back and forth, soaring higher like she is untethered to the ground, like the hawk one of her soulmarks had been only that morning.

The thought makes her want to get off the swings, but there is a sandpit nearby to explore.

And, off-puttingly, a child, screaming. 

She has fallen off the climbing frame, facedown with hair in the darkest shade of yellow that she can see falling around her face, and the diagnosis hasn’t happened yet, but it is for the same reason that lands her in a wheelchair years later. Huffing, Yellow goes to see what the matter with her is. It’s rather difficult to play in the sandpit with somebody bawling for their mother right next to her.

She turns the little girl called Blue over and sits her up.

There’s a strange, funny feeling in her chest, and suddenly her eyes ache and her temples pound and now they’re both crying, drawing the attention of the adults.

Then they go silent, breathless, watching colours swirl around them. Blue sees buttercups shining bright gold and a yellow painted climbing frame, Yellow sees the deep turquoise of the sky, the chipped and flaking paint on the park bench. And together, they can see the verdant spread of the emerald green grass.

When their apologetic mothers collect them, their eyes have turned bright, hard green, and they are clutching onto one another and staring with the dazed, blissful expressions of those seeing something wholly new.

 “Oh, thank God,” says Yellow’s mother. “Does she have all three too?”

The mothers, nearly teary eyed with relief, adjourn to a nearby Americano café, small and neatly-kept with zinc-topped tables and a smiling blonde waitress. Blue and Yellow must be fussed, of course, and bought cakes and hot chocolate to celebrate the Finding. When the two children are adequately placated, staring alternately at each other over steamy mugs of hot chocolate with the innocent curiosity to the young, then at the wide, suddenly colourful world beyond the fogged glass of the cafe window, the mothers are free to talk, pouring out words in hushed whispers hoarsened by relief.

“I thought that Blue would never know-“ Blue’s mother stops, because Yellow’s mother has taken her hand, perfectly able to understand a mother’s fear that her child would never know something she considered a great joy.

They exchange contact details, and haggle over free weekdays for regular play dates. Each mother leaves satisfied, convinced that she has worn down the other into a better deal, half-yanking their child along when they stop too frequently to stare in intense and enrapt amazement at the light shining through a veined leaf, a yellow bumblebee’s iridescent wings, the deep murky blue of fountain water.

As Yellow grows, her childhood is spent split double, half in her own life, half in Blue’s. They have sleepovers that last over four days, their own mugs in each house, using clothes (Blue steals Yellow’s combat boots, Yellow borrows with no intention of returning her sweltering hoodies) and toothbrushes interchangeably, living inside each other, like wearing in comfortable shoes that never break. Yellow comes to look on Blue’s mother like a stepmother, her second family.

It is Blue who approaches Yellow’s mother and tells her and Yellow both that Yellow is dyslexic. They work on strategies and techniques together, in between visiting Blue at hospital, finding ribbons and spray paint to decorate Blue’s new wheelchair’s rims.

They do everything for the first time together, learning to ride a bike, watching the sea coming in colours they can both see, watching films through special tinted glasses, swapping books with the text printed in Braille, shopping for clothes by texture rather than colour. Yellow comes to look at her life as an addendum to Blue, they are inseparable, parts of each other – she is convinced she can feel Blue’s patient amusement as she struggles through a timed essay, her pride when Yellow argues with her science teacher.

Blue kisses her for the first time when they are thirteen. They are sat on Blue’s bed, Saturday sunlight streaming through the window, highlighting the glossy darkness in Blue’s hair, the liquid shine of her eyes. She is leaning close, applying wobbly eyeliner to Yellow’s eyes. She leans back, to survey her work. Then, in that matter-of-fact way that Blue sometimes has when she is most nervous, Blue puts her small hand on Yellow’s cheek and her lips clumsily on Yellow’s. They both pause there, uncertain of what to do next, until they are interrupted from an untimely quarter.

Blue winces, Yellow grimaces. The grey soulmark is burning as it changes shape. United, they move apart, and Blue shifts her leg so that they can see the soulmark altering on the inside of her left thigh, bared by her shorts. Yellow’s legs tangle with hers, so it looks like the vivid pink mark on her ankle (in the shape of a wobbly child’s drawing of a ratty doll missing one leg) is the shadow of the grey mark on Blue’s thigh.

The soulmark shapes itself into words, and without needing to be asked, Yellow Googles a translation. She hesitates a bit before saying what it means.

“I’m nothing without you,” Yellow translates.

Blue looks at the soulmark on her thigh, then pokes the broken pink doll on Yellow’s ankle. “Do you think they’re okay? Do you think we will ever meet them one day?”

“I think if I have you, I don’t care,” Yellow tells her honestly, slumping back on the bed to reply to a text.

“Mm,” Blue agrees, and lies next to her, her head a pleasant weight on Yellow’s shoulder, the sunlight moving in dizzying patterns across the ceiling as the screen of Yellow’s phone scatters reflections. It looks like the sky is dancing for just the two of them, and as if the world has never been sweeter or brighter than in that moment.


	2. Ivory

Yellow is nineteen when she finds her third soulmate in an introduction to economics university seminar. It’s a 9AM lecture, but the room is packed for once. Set up like a great amphitheatre with a stage lit by a spotlight, it doubles as a theatre for the drama students. She sees the small halo of light on the speaker’s lectern in robust shades of flaxen gold, and the surrounding swathes of shadow in the deep navy blue colour that appears at night, when the champagne-coloured moon is yet to rise.

She is half asleep, texting Blue under the table, her thumb running over the Braille. Blue is complaining that her lecturer is late. Yellow smiles and is about to reply that hers is too when that tell-tale hush sweeps over the lecture theatre, and she looks up to see a spiky head of hair bobbing over the lectern.

The phone suddenly falls from nerveless fingers. Another text from Blue flashes, goes ignored. The back of her neck throbs with savage pain, sending jagged tongues racing down her spine. A profound dizziness rocks her, as if her world is shaking apart, as if an earthquake is fracturing the sky and reaching through the shards to pluck out the stars and whirl them in a helter-skelter around her skull.

The lecturer steps up to the microphone, blinks and shakes her head a little, as if a fly landed on her temple, then she looks up directly into Yellow’s eyes.

The quickening hits her like a bolt of lightning. Her world suddenly pulses, darkens, wavers, throbs, and strange shadows and palenesses creep across her vision like mottled, recumbent tree limbs lying in the road, too close to avoid a crash. The lecturer’s notes are fluttering everywhere, like swift white birds, the colourlessness of them astonishingly stark against the velvety black of shadow, the grey-golds of the washed out light, the faint gleam of sweat on skin, the colours of bone and ash and midnight, swirling across her vision and reaching into her heart. The soulmark on her neck burns with a bittersweet pleasure.

It feels as if a new world has dropped out in front of her, and she can see everything, the shadows, the contrast, the faces turning to stare in bewilderment, the look of absolute horror on Mme White’s face as she rushes to leave the lecture theatre, notes and class abandoned.

Yellow reacts too slowly to stop her, and her cry of _“WAIT!”_ arouses nothing but the pity of the students who have guessed the incredible misfortune of what has occurred. She cannot bear the way they skirt around her, silent and staring, as they funnel out and leave.

Alone in the lecture theatre, Yellow stares at her hands in a dull sort of shock. She is shaking. The jangle of her ringtone startles her. Blue. She picks up.

“Yellow, what happened? I felt –?”

“I found her, and she _left_.”

“… Oh, Yellow.”

Yellow comes home to Blue that night with glittering black eyes and nothing else. Mme White has disappeared, and Yellow has missed her first day of classes in order to go round and quiz the management, demanding to know anything, everything, _“something, she’s my soulmate damnit, can’t you tell me anything?”_ The apologetic clerk is only able to tell her that Mme White has transferred herself to a different department, taken the day off sick, and doesn’t wish to be contacted. She breaks into the staffroom without regrets, steals the neatly-labelled lunch (tracing the stylised signature, simply, _WD)_ that Mme White has forgotten about in her rush to leave her soulmates in the dust. A plain sandwich of white bread, proper butter spread thinly, lettuce, tomato, cheese. A bottle of water.

“A miser’s lunch,” she texts Blue. “I think she eats like a rabbit.”

That night, they curl up together with Blue’s laptop across Yellow’s legs and trawl the ‘net. Mme White doesn’t have any social media accounts, and her name brings up nothing apart from her position as a lecturer at the university. It’s like she doesn’t exist, has wiped herself completely from the world to prevent them from finding her.

Time passes and so does Yellow’s hope. Mme White is an expert at hiding, and Yellow is bitterly aware that she doesn’t seem to want them in her life. If it weren’t for Blue, Yellow would give up looking. But there is Blue, Blue’s eyes which are still the green fresh-cut grass, Blue who is desperately envious even though she won’t say it of Yellow, who can see the colour of snow, the pastel shades of ice cream, the gloss of a raven’s wing.

But now, four years later, Yellow has finished her course, and once she leaves university, the possibility of ever finding White becomes hopelessly remote. She scowls blackly into something alcoholic in a paper cup, knocks it back with a wince.

It’s supposedly a leaving party. Yellow can’t help but think of it as the final funeral of her hopes for the soulmate who apparently is too good for Yellow and Blue. She had said once that the two of them, just Blue and her, could make it on their own just fine, but that was before reclaiming a third of her soul and having it summarily rejected.

She decides to go and get something stronger than the piss in the cup they’re handing out, something to get her properly drunk so that she can wake up tomorrow evening with a pounding hangover, and Blue, cool calm Blue who isn’t enough. Yellow wobbles to her feet, knocks into someone accidentally, grunts an apology.

“No, it was quite my fault,” says Mme White, impossibly, immediately, physically _there,_ right there, touching her, firm hand holding her elbow, a sharp stare seeming to pierce right down into Yellow’s drunken core, ivory-gold eyes in a pale white face, – God, _where was the colour on her? –_ bleached hair and a thin, uncomfortable smile. “I think I was too close to you.”

The thought occurs to Yellow that it is the first time that White could be possibly accused of that, and then, simultaneously, inspired by alcohol, whether she would mind if it happened again. Closer.

White looks uncomfortably out of place with her crisp pantsuit in the hall of drunk students. She is holding a glass of bubbly yellow champagne, maybe to fit in, despite that the champagne looks fancier than anything Yellow has been drinking all evening.

Quietly, White follows her eyes and says, “I’ve grown appreciation for it.” She tilts the champagne in her glass, takes a sip. She seems unperturbed by Yellow staring as the bubbly liquid disappears behind her lips and the glass falls away again, the faintest print of her mouth remaining, her throat flexing with the swallow. Yellow imagines it, tingling down into her stomach, and maybe it’s the alcohol, but her mouth feels dry. “This, and honey.”

Yellow blinks at her, and White smiles at her oddly in a way that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.

“I think we have a lot of talking to do, you and I. Would you care to take the air with me?” White asks, and somehow there is a genuine question hidden under there, and Yellow’s drunk mind fumbles at it, slips and drops.

“I think I’d follow you anywhere,” Yellow blurts, a little breathier than she intends, and immediately kicks herself - she’s half drunk, tongue loosened, but what a way to drive the woman away before they’ve even properly met! “I’m sorry- I-”

But White laughs, even if it sounds a little tense. “Come then, Eurydice,” she says, and Yellow isn’t about to ask her what she means by that.

The air outside is surprisingly cold against Yellow’s hot and sweaty forehead. There is a garden outside the hall, beer bottles peeking out from underneath shrubberies, a perfect vista of stars against the backdrop of the sturdy redbrick buildings, pale crenulations of stone intricate in silhouette, and the air smells of flowers, damp daffodils.

White finds a bench and they sit at opposite ends, careful distance between them. Yellow is half certain that she is dreaming, sat on a park bench talking about the weather at 3 AM with her soulmate while the wind stirs at the hollow branches of the trees, prickles her skin with goosebumps. It feels as if she dares to look White in the eye, she will disappear again, if she doesn’t, she’ll miss her fading away.

The question bubbles and burns up inside her, and they both know it’s there, and eventually, White sighs and one of her shoulders drop, and Yellow knows it for the concession it is and pounces on it.

“Why? Why the long silence? We- I thought that you-” She stops, aware that she has covered half the distance between them, her hand stretching out of the bench.

White looks her, steadily. She gives her the courtesy enough by not leaning away, but there is a firm and polite warning in her voice when she says, “I am thirty-seven this year. I think it’s inappropriate enough, don’t you?”

Yellow glances away. The conversation recovers, stiltedly, awkwardly. But they are both too desperate to let silence reign for too long.

The sky is lightening and Yellow’s head is beginning to seriously pound when White finally looks at the watch on her wrist, sighs, and the process of parting commences. White gives her a card with her contact details on, and somehow it’s all the sweeter to be given it willingly. Her glittering eyes hold Yellow’s with undivided attention as Yellow gives her directions to a little café in town that she knows, and Yellow swells unconsciously under the praise of her attention.

“Next Saturday? There’s someone you have to meet.” Yellow feels the foolish grin stretching her face, but can’t bring herself to care. She’s brimming with excitement. Wait ‘til Blue hears! Wait ‘til Blue _sees!_

“I will be there,” White asserts, cool and calm and mannerly. She hesitates a moment, and a hint of colour rises in her cheeks, but a sudden determination comes over her. Almost too quickly for Yellow to follow, she catches Yellow’s hand and grazes her lips over her knuckles.

White releases her hand and straightens, adjusting the lapel of her jacket. “It has been a pleasure meeting you, Yellow,” she says, and walks away, her heels clicking on the pavement.

Yellow stares at her stupidly, only remembers to yell a quick, _“BYE!”_ when White is halfway down the path. A hand raises in acknowledgement, then White rounds the corner and disappears.

Sagging down onto the bench, Yellow rings Blue and tells her everything.


	3. Cyan

White waits in monochrome. In theory, waiting should be something as familiar to her as the anxious rap-tap-tap of her nails on the faux-wood cafe table. In practice, she has never had an end of lingering on the edge of something in sight. Not just a something. Her. The impossible golden phantasm. White tastes honey and champagne, swallows hard.

Honey. She ate pots of it in the first week after, thick and sticky and syrupy on her cheeks and chin, her greedy fingers. Cheery yellow paint, flowers that shade of sickle harvest fields. Sunlight, tans, bronze flesh, lemons and melons, sharp and sweet, heavy with juice and fragrance, swollen. White quivers. Her pale flesh is stained.

Her fingers are fiddling with the locket again. She stops them. Irrepressibly, they start up again. She has worn this locket for over two decades, and only four years ago saw the heavy ornate-brass colour of it. The edges are soothing and familiar; a flake of ancient grey blood dusts off.

Monochrome. She’s made an effort today. There is a daffodil in her lapel; her hair is combed in a semblance of order. Every so often, her fingers touch the bruised yellow petals. They still feel soft and satiny. Like the skin her lips can still remember, that so-intimate, so-inappropriate kiss. Why did she do that? Why did she do that? She couldn’t stop herself at the time, struggles to tell herself that she would if presented the opportunity again. White is too old for these games, and she is too young. But her golden ghost is seeing her today, and far less inebriated.

White’s shaking hands grasp the locket again. Daytime. Sober. There is no illusion of magic she can create here. She has kept away for four years, four feverish years. Is she worth the wait? Her Eurydice is summoned from the dim shifting black, but her Orpheus’ voice is cracked and his poetry is better improved by the fire that eats it.

She has ordered tea. Lemon. The waitress has been looking at her disapprovingly as she takes up table space without buying anything. She sips it now, ignoring how the tea slops in the cup. The cup jitters against the saucer as she sets it down.

The shop bell rings. She flinches. Two people, one in a chair. Not hers. No, hers.

White stands suddenly, awkwardly; the chair clatters. This is Yellow and her friend. White has stressed herself to sickness on it. Her – Yellow’s friend. What sort of friend? A lover? No, she said a _someone._ What someone is so important that White has to meet them first thing? She has hoped and feared it would be a lover. Please may she be in love with another, so White can never justify her depraved desires. Another boundary, to keep her away.

Under the suit, her skin crawls. Black poison laughs on her hidden skin. The marks are aching. They are always aching, with the sting of cuts. She ignores it. Ignorance is passive yet the act of ignoring is exhaustive.

Like a magnet, that which is White yearns closer to the unbearably defined edges of her. It seems false to look on her with such nakedness. Her citrine dream has outlines as soft as the bubbles of champagne, she has never stood the test of daylight, she is for the lead blackness, sheets and sweat. White drinks in her face. The shine of her eyes is like the dappled glitter of pitch black water under a yellow streetlight. Her skin is soft and fresh with vibrancy. White’s lips burn like all of those grey days chasing shadows of peace in whiskey are come again.

“Good afternoon,” she hears herself say. Politeness comes as a default.

“Hey,” says Yellow. She is frowning. She is jabbing chairs aside to make room for the wheelchair, they clatter like church bells, deep and sonorous. Everything is gravid with her. Every strain of sound matters; White can’t look back to see if Eurydice weeps. She tries to move a chair herself but it creaks and groans under her hands and White feels splinters and crunched bone instead of wood. Her hands are wet with sweat.

Her someone. The wheelchair is sorted. The hooded person within blurs like a shadow, like the edge of dusk or a pencil sketch lovingly thumbed until the graphite slides meekly against the page, staining it in intermediate shades of grey. White knows all there is to know about grey. There is nothing washed out about her someone, she draws in the light like a black hole, like a vacuum’s tube throbbing in White’s hands as the careful patina of dust she has constructed over herself is remorselessly sucked away.

White sits down. Her knees feel weak.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” says her someone, and she lets the hood collapse around her face. Her eyes are still green, but her soft and full lips are curved up in a knowing smile, like a cat, like an angel on a heavily-coloured Renaissance painting, a creature of subtle brushstrokes and exaggerated agony in a world sick with sin.

“Oh,” whispers White. She is aware that the life is draining out of her face.

The world clicks a few degrees to the left. A watch resettles and tells the time of an alternate universe three hundred years in the future. Darkness blossoms in both their eyes.

Blue reaches across the table and takes White’s hand. A bridge stretches, narrow and built of frayed rope, across the canyon that rears up in her, deep and all-consuming in its huge terror. A dim comfort comes from them. A warm hand enfolds her, and she is caught in between them, breathing too fast, skin sliding against skin.

White yanks her hands back. The table has imprints from her nails. She is panting. Her tea splatters the table and gleams damply in little puddles. She swallows. The heat of it chases down her throat, is somehow grounding. She swallows, drinks more. It glows in her stomach, a warm knot, teetering on the edge of release.

“Now there are two,” White tells herself. Her voice cracks and wavers high.

“My name’s Blue,” says Blue. “We are something of a package deal, Yellow and I.”

White’s soulmarks are throbbing righteously. All these years she has doubted them, and they have made her a fool. She supposes that she is not broken after all.

“Did you order food already?” Yellow asks.


	4. Candyfloss

The business trip has been planned a long time, but it is still no easier to leave Yellow and Blue at the airport, to confront the long silent plane journey alone, and arrive at a foreign hotel without them at her side. White is the university’s emissary to their partner institution in Berlin this year. Her German is shaky, but passable; she and Blue have learnt it together over their worn oak kitchen table, wrestling with indefinite articles over steaming mugs of tea or hot chocolate, Yellow scowling down at her computer screen with fingers flying over the keys on the sofa.

She misses them like a physical ache. The hotel room is opulent enough, but empty and cold without Blue and Yellow’s eyes on it. There is a sofa long enough for Yellow’s tall frame, all leg and torso and neck, the bathtub looks big enough to fit Yellow and Blue together – they are rarely apart, not even in the shower or in bed.

It has only been five years, but they have written themselves on the fabric of White’s mind, and the stitches refuse to come undone. She touches the ring, their promise ring, set with a citrine, a sapphire, and a glistening opal. Yellow, Blue, White, bound together in silver. Something in her heart calms.

The moment her phone connects to the hotel Wi-Fi, the screen lights up in an explosion of messages. White smiles in the blue glow of the screen. She is not the only one who is missing someone.

_Yellow: Have you arrived yet?_

_Yellow: Blue says the toaster is broken again._

_Yellow: I still don’t see her problem, there’s nothing wrong with toast that’s actually done instead of the pasty bits of bread that she likes._

_Yellow: I think I fixed it, she’s in a huff she won’t talk to me_

_Yellow: I’ve brought her a peace offering of tea and now she loves me again._

_Yellow: I’m assuming you’ll get these when you get into the hotel…_

_Yellow: We’re going to bed now. Sleep well._

_Yellow: Blue says to tell that she misses you and you’re not to stay up too long worrying, we’re only a call away. You will call if something happens, won’t you?_

_Yellow: Goodnight._

She replies to the texts, but when her phone screen has gone dark again, the temporary reprieve seems to sink out of her. She is alone, an unbridgeable gap withers between them, and there is no one in her head, but herself.

The room grows darker. The yellowish drapes at the window ripple like the torn lungs of a breathing creature, the pale knife shard gleam of glass reflecting through them like syringes, sharp enough to cut herself on. The undulating carpet is cream, and furry, like the exposed trap of a cat’s belly, needle calls poised to rend the unwary hand, the bed underneath her turns liquid and sucking, threatening to envelop her. White can feel the black marks on her skin under her clothes, festering with the kiss of dead liars, nearly forgotten pretenders, and nausea crams up so suddenly that she retches where she lies.

The bile sticks in her throat and she rolls over, coughing, clearing her throat. She clenches her fists, her heart pounding against her ribs. _Breathe,_ she reminds herself, and quells her fidgeting hands, thinking of Blue and stillness and peace.

Sometime in the second year in the big house after Yellow and Blue moved in, Blue had fallen asleep on White’s chest in the living room. She insisted on cuddling, claiming cold, and they had been watching a film and Yellow was on the armchair, and White hadn’t felt able to refuse, though every part of her thundered with panic. And Blue had fallen asleep there, head nestled under her chin, somnolent, trusting, perfect, and White had hardly dared to breathe, keeping her own eyes closed in case she opened them and it was all a dream. The film had ended, and Yellow had sighed, the armchair creaking as she moved. She’d covered them both with a blanket, kissed Blue softly on the head – hesitated, unbearably long over White, then with utmost gentleness, kissed her too.

It is her softest and calmest memory, and White draws on it now, remembering Yellow’s lips against her forehead – how she craves them, how she refuses them – and Blue’s sleeping weight on her chest.

Her heartbeat begins to even. White smiles to herself, unclenching her fists and rubbing away the crescent marks in her palms from her nails.

Then the knock on the door comes, and she nearly jumps out of her skin.

The knock is followed by a breathy little giggle, then someone presses the buzzer. White eyes the door as if it will bite her, but approaches warily, depressing the buzzer quickly.

“Special delivery,” a coquettish voice crackles on the other end of the buzzer.

White finds herself pulling a very Yellow-esque frown. “I didn’t ask for anything, or anyone,” White hisses, annoyed, hearing static in her own voice.

There is damp breathing down the other side of the buzzer, then the woman says again, wheedling, “Herr Fischer, are you teasing me?”

“I am not Herr Fischer,” White snaps, “You have the wrong room.”

“It’s Pink,” Pink says, sounding desperate now, “Sir-“

White yanks open the door. Pink standing on the other side gasps and draws back her hand, blinking with a startling youth. Just as quickly, she alters her stance slightly – pushing her impressive breasts out, already heaving out of the front of the very short black dress she wears, teetering on too-high heels and too much makeup – and it vanishes, too quickly to be anything but practiced. Foundation smears a black mark over her left breast, and White feels something itch in the back of her mind even as Pink’s hand absently touches the soulmark, wincing.

“Oh!” Pink rocks back on her heels and for a moment, threatens falling over entirely. She totters forward and hits the door. “My apologies – ma’am!” She puts her hand to her pretty head, scrunching her face up. “Oh, I don’t-“

Abruptly, she shakes her head, as if a switch has been flipped, and her eyes foam with new colour. She looks at White with sudden realisation. A familiar pulsing ache is building up inside White, and she starts to back away, some part of her screaming, some part of her aching and stretching towards the scantily clad stranger at the door. Her breaths come in great gasps.

It all happens too fast for White to offer a word of protest.

“You’re mine, aren’t you?” Pink asks, and the greed in her eyes boils over and drowns White under its heat, until she is strung out, breathless and dry and quivering under the hot expanse of Pink’s hand wrenching up her shirt, looking for the soulmark she feels, but cannot see.

White cries out as if she has been torn and twists away, and Pink’s fingers run caressingly over squiggly mark curving alongside her spine, the brand which stamps them together. There is a prickling over her skin, tightening, sensitive, White thinks she maybe makes some sort of noise, electric pulsing behind her eyes, hanging limply from Pink’s grip on her shirt. Pink throws back her head and laughs.

Pink’s eyes are swirling black and grey and she fists her hand in White’s tie and kisses her, takes her breath and steals it. White feels a dizzying blackness at the edge of her vision, realises she has forgotten to breathe. Her hair falls, red, red, red, around her face – White squints, shakes. The headache of the settling bond rockets back into her skull, settles in the base of her spine, flushes flickering flames through her stomach.

“Nice tie,” Pink gasps, pupils blown huge, “I like a woman who comes prepared.”


	5. Orange

They meet Yellow at the entrance of the airport, a spiky shape silhouetted against the greasy background of city sky, cars and bustling business people. White recognises her through the crowd, and tows Pink towards her with the determination of a ship shattering through ice floes. The crowd parts like water, snatches of foreign conversation breaking up around them like static. Pink hovers behind White, the queasiness from the flight, not quite having settled, suddenly roaring up again. With White, it was an accident, a chance meeting in a hotel room, Pink’s ground. They’d kissed and White’s ribs had pushed trustingly into her hands, her heart spilling out of her dove-grey chest to beat its last withering gasps in her bloody palms, the fluttering of her breath pulled down Pink’s throat, and the bond had settled in shades of pink and red and grey as their skin had mottled from bruises and blushes. But this is no such familiar battleground of flesh – this is pre-mediated, and Pink can’t help but fear that Yellow will find her lacking.

“White! Is this-?” Her voice is rich and sharp, like bitter dark chocolate, Pink can dimly hear in an undertone of White in the tutored affectations. It’s a familiar voice, though undiluted for the first time, like moving from latte to espresso, and gives Pink just the scrap of courage needed to meet Yellow’s eyes.

“Hi – uhh.”

Pink chokes on air, then doubles over in a coughing fit, liked exploding behind her eyes like a frenetic circus whirl of honey and crème. She can see the gold edging on Yellow’s shoes and the flecks of nail polish on her toes, and feels the pale marble floor slanted in shades of citrus orange from the sunlight, from the stained glass, stained – as if an overlay has been saturated with the earthiest colours of light and life, heat and warmth and fire. She can’t suck in enough breath to fuel her lungs, there is an elastic band, tightening around her throat, forcing fire to flare in her veins, just like being choked by a man on a power-rush with the money to pay for hurting her bundled up in a thick wad that bulged the front of his jeans (they could do anything, provided they could pay for the damage) but hotter and sweeter and purifying. Her body turns to incense, the smoke rolling off from Yellow’s skin, that sheer shade of gold, intangible, physical, with oily hands and greedy mouth, something sensual, slipping, sliding into the dark warmth of Pink and filling her up from the inside with curling shoots, a sunflower that bursts out of her chest, leaves dappling her skin, buttery petals and dimple black seeds.

Like orgasm, the snapped band of shuddering overdose fades into warm laps of steady, assured gold, leaving behind the faintest aches in her soulmark, raw, as if it has been picked at with the ripe concentration of peeling scabs from young shins, hardened from kneeling. It is over and gone in moments, and in increments Pink comes back into herself and realises that White has carefully shepherded the two of them against a wall, sympathetic passers-by smiling with the patronising fondness of strangers, their faces blurring, unexpectedly beautiful.

“Well,” murmurs Yellow. She is breathing quickly too, the hollow of sweat between her collarbones bared by her shirt gleaming as if it begged for a kiss, and her expression is tender and wonderstruck, as if she has just been presented with the dawn wrapped in a paper thin package of silk and dragonfly wings, to dissolve upon the tongue like the taste of candyfloss.

“Well,” Pink agrees, and they both laugh a little hoarsely, painting their faces back on like properly civilised people.

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you in person,” Yellow says warmly, her eyes sparkling. She shakes Pink’s hand, and Pink blushes, glancing away in uncharacteristic shyness.

Over the past three months they have spoken often through video calls and texts, but somehow it’s different face-to-face. She’s taller in person, more solid, clear-cut and polished in the lines of her suit, wealth and authority radiating from every gleaming, straight blonde hair. Pink’s heart pounds unsteadily. She wants to kiss Yellow’s thin lips, see her piercing eyes darkened and intimate, wants to touch and be touched without the paper stab of money digging into her hip. Such desires White refuses her, vacillating between paroxysms of pity and agonies of arousal. She has allowed Pink to kiss her only once, and never to see the marks Pink knows are hidden under her clothes.

“Shall I go wait in the car?” White asks tartly from behind them, and Yellow chuckles, turning to attend to her. Pink feels as if the sun has gone out.

“We missed you,” Yellow says.

Yellow and White embrace stiffly, kissing each other on each cheek. Despite the awkwardness of the interaction, when they draw apart and hold each other, hands clutching their elbows, and simply stare at one another as if they can see each other’s minds unrolled like a map before them, it feels like the bond between them is visible as a deep and consuming connection thrumming like a heartbeat.

Pink looks on with a pang of envy, but barely has she had time to hang her head in embarrassment then the two of them break apart and the business of leaving grounds everything. Yellow insists on carrying White’s bag, and they argue about it all the way to the car, a drab rainy affair in a ponderously grey car park of perfectly equidistant lines.

She is trailing behind them, listening to the way they talk to each other with the learned comfort of years not quite concealing a natural prickle, a fission, a lingering. She is trying to figure out what it means, something that feels as soapy as ancient chess pieces carved from elephant tusks, a game played in silence and strategy, when a hollering man snaps her concentration.

“Miss! Miss!” It takes Pink a moment to realise that he is speaking to her, a moment longer to remember the response.

“What is it?” She asks him. He is earnest and suntanned, a tourist returned, clutching White’s purse in his hand.

“Sorry, Miss, I think your mother dropped this,” he says, well-meaning, and Pink winces as ahead, White’s back turns ramrod stiff.

“She’s not my mother,” Pink mutters, seizes the purse. “Thanks.”

She leaves him, scurrying to catch up with White and Yellow, glancing anxiously at White, as if she could have possibly missed what the man assumed. The nineteen years between them suddenly looms huge and unbridgeable.

“White-“ Yellow begins, quietly, reaching out to touch her arm, but White jerks away as if burnt and made a horrible attempt at high, unnatural laugh.

“Come on then,” she says, with false lightness. “Let’s get in the car. Shall I drive?”

"I will," says Yellow, soft but strong. "You must be tired from the flight."

Yellow and Pink glance at each other, and Pink silently opts to sit in the back. White, without complaint, leans forward and begins to fiddle with the radio. Synth rock bubbles from speakers, and she turns a raised eyebrow to Yellow, who shrugs.

“Blue.” They share it like a joke, and the awkwardness tenderises back into that deep regard of before. Pink looks on, alternating her stare between the two heads in the front seats and the grave view outside the window. Blue is the fourth, she knows, away for a while, a few days’ trip training for her work. Pink can’t help but be glad that meeting the two of them is staggered. If they are as synchronised as White claims, the two of them together would be overwhelming.

This is her home now. It feels strange to think of it, strangely freeing. Yellow and White are strangers from a strange country, but yet she already knows that she can trust them more than any other person alive. She wonders if this is how White felt, leaving France with nothing but the clothes on her back and a promise from the government to protect her, a promise that seem to have brought her nothing but red tape whenever she needs to move between countries. White was very earnest in her attempts to delay their leaving from Berlin until she is absolutely certain that Pink has fully considered the impact of moving away from home.

“There’s nothing for me here,” Pink had snapped, and White had responded, “There is more than you know that you will miss when it is gone.”

Pink wonders how much the others know about White’s past. She is older than Blue and Yellow, but it is as if her existence sprouted into life upon meeting them - White will never talk about anything before it. But there are some things that are harder to hide when living in the same hotel room for three months, and Pink has caught enough glimpses of White preparing for the shower or bed or both to know that she is keeping secrets on her skin. She wonders if Yellow has any secrets to hide.

Pink eyes the back of Yellow’s head, considering. Yellow is smiling, a small little smile that doesn’t seem to want to overwhelm her face, and her eyes are affectionate when she glances towards White when taking a turning. White’s head rests back, eyes closed, mouth parted slightly as if she is communing with the poppy-spirit of the music. She looks relaxed and distant all at once, and Yellow hovers on the edge of disturbing her, uncertain of what she is allowed.

Pink thinks dryly that she rather understands how Yellow feels. She wonders how White would react if she could convince Yellow to work with her to wear down White’s defences. She wonders what it would take to make the two of them hers.

The sky is orange, soft and bruised with pinkish clouds. Pink unwinds the window, and feels the wind kiss her cheeks with a smile. It tastes of smoke and city-air, but it does not bother her.

Something in her soul feels fuller than before.


	6. Purple

Pink, half awake, listens to the stolid shifting the old house and watches the shadows flicker and spin on the walls. There is an orange streetlamp outside the spare room’s window that shines through the knobbly branches of a determined young tree, striping the walls in orange gold segments of amber, skinny shadow-snakes trapped in between, still wriggling when the wind sighs past. White has told her the house was built in 1838, a year after the succession of a queen and renovated into a bungalow many years later. According to White, the house likes to shift her timbers when everyone else goes to sleep. Pink thinks that she would like to do that too, if she was that old.

White’s eyes bright and shifting with mischief make her smile in fond memory. Idly, Pink wishes to be back in the hotel room in Berlin, the curtains flapping in the breeze and White’s body visible as a breathing, still lump under the covers. If Pink was sneaky, she could creep into bed with her and something automatic in White would roll over to make room, and Pink could cuddle her and she wouldn’t move away until she woke up. White was always annoyed when she did, worried that Pink has peeked under her clothes, worried that White has somehow overstepped the boundaries White put on their relationship and invited her in, but the annoyance is worth the lazy comfort of having someone Pink absolutely trusts curled up against her safe and warm and breathing, her hair tickling Pink’s nose and her sleepy murmurs against Pink’s skin, seeing the sleep-blurred tenderness blind those piercing grey eyes.

Pink hasn’t told them yet that she can’t sleep in a room by herself, too quiet, too empty, too lonely. It’s a double bed, and the hugeness of it feels empty and vast. It’s only been three days since she arrived in their big, old house, with the memories of all of _their_ time together in every scratch on the walls, and Pink a stranger, an awkward, inconvenient stranger. She is anxious for them to love her, even though the marks mean that they _have_ to. But Pink wants more than that, wants more than just their love. Their respect, their devotion.

Pink sighs and shuffles her cheek against the pillow. She closes her eyes again and attempted to doze off, sinking into an uneasy greyness, a half-dream where characters from her life wandered around against an uncertain backdrop, shifting and melting. She sees Herr Fischer, the man she was supposed to meet the night she found White instead, his liver-spotted pate, his ruddy nose, his shaky, eager hands. He wasn’t so bad, she thinks, compared to some of them, just a lonely old man with the money to pay for a young girl. He’d bring her sweets and chocolate sometimes, little trinkets from the market that he’d seen and thought of her, and even better, he was a repeat client, a little bit of assured money every month or so.

Pink shakes her head and shifts in bed, trying to put the memories out of her mind. She concentrates on Yellow instead and wonders, ashily, whether Yellow would look at her with the same careful combination of appreciation and warmth if she knew how many people have bought Pink. It isn’t that Pink is ashamed of herself for doing what she has had to do to survive, but… Pink sensibly knows that none of them care, they are hers and she is theirs, it is simply how soulmarks _work,_ but she still fears. They all know, all three of them. They’d had frank discussions over Skype about how to proceed now there are four of them, with different needs and stages of life, and barely two weeks after their first Skype call, Yellow and Blue started decorating the spare room for Pink’s arrival. 

Pink still wishes that White were in the bed with her. Or even Yellow, though Pink has not known her for so long, and she is out, collecting Blue. Anyone but the ghosts of the past. White’s room is just down the hall, it would be easy to go and find her. She restrains the urge.

The house groans and shifts. Somewhere, a car crunches across a driveway and the beam of headlights sweep through the trees. Pink stares up at the ceiling in the dark and tries her best to think about nothing in particular.

Quietly downstairs, the front door opens and closes. Pink listens, body attuned to every sound. She hears the soft exchange of voices, then the whirr of something mechanical. It must be Blue and Yellow, returned already.

“White and Pink are asleep,” Yellow murmurs outside her door. “Come on. Do you want to go to the bathroom before bed?”

“I should be all right,” a softer, unfamiliar voice answers. “Thank you. Why don’t you go and get ready – I – I just want to look at her a moment.”

Pink’s heartbeat picks up and begins to thunder behind her chest. Her soulmark warms appreciatively, recognising the presence outside her door. She clenches the sheets in a suddenly sweaty grip, rigid under the duvet and every sense straining towards eavesdropping.

Yellow hesitates. “Blue,” she says, reprovingly.

 _“Yellow._ White made me wait, too. I can be patient until she’s ready for me. I won’t wake her.” Blue’s voice is full of tired yearning.

Yellow sighs exasperatedly, and Pink hears the retreating sound of her footsteps. Her heart hammering in her chest, Pink freezes and tries to look like she is asleep and definitely not staring, eyes huge and round, at the door, waiting for her last soulmate to reveal herself behind it. Blue makes her wait for almost a minute.

Achingly slowly, the doorknob turns, the squeak of the turning metal almost inaudible. A chink of light appears in the doorway, blotted just as quickly by a shadow. Blue pushes the door halfway ajar, tentatively and gently. Pink beholds her silhouette, a seated figure in soft voluminous drapes of a skirt and a business blouse, breasts pressing against the buttons, the metal rims of her wheelchair catching the light. The soulmark burns and ebbs like a hot coal sinking into the pit of her stomach, and Pink is aware of the light on her face, her open eyes. Blue inhales when she sees that Pink is awake, and her hands tremble on the rims of her wheelchair.

Blue propels herself closer in the wheelchair and the closer she comes the hotter the soulmark burns, until Pink kicks off her duvet to clutch at her arm and the mark as hot as a brand. A diffusing begins, and the shadows wash strange, deep colours, the colours of bruises, prickling warmth chasing up and down Pink's spine. Blue reaches out and touches Pink’s cheek, and the bond washes through them with the sudden, ineffable flood of lavender water, rosewater and oil. A pulse rockets into her brain from where Blue's fingers are brushing Pink's skin, and as the brightness fades the darkness trickles in, shimmering in iridescent shades.

It is nothing like it was with White, physical and jagged, and nothing like Yellow, fiery and all-consuming. Finalising the bond with Blue feels like sinking backwards into a warm bath at the end of a long day, candles twisting flickering lights over the walls and hot steam easing the ache of tensions she is barely aware of. Pink can smell patchouli and dust, a warm, fruity fragrance, tastes a plum with dribbling juice over her chin and the slide of silk on her skin. Peace purrs through her entire being, a sense of ineffable wholeness, a feeling of warm, tender completion that lingers in her muscles and her bones, and Pink doesn’t realise she’s crying until Blue’s hand tenderly wipes the tears away. For some reason, it feels natural, as if she has found something that she lost, rather than gained something entirely new.

“Hello, Pink,” Blue says, warmly, as if this is not the first time that they have ever met face-to-face. “How are you feeling?”

Pink clings onto her hand and turns her cheek into it, sniffling unsteadily. Blue leans forward and begins stroking her hair, and without prompting, takes up the burden of talking.

“I’m sorry I didn’t ring you before you got on the plane,” Blue says apologetically, “I was in a meeting and I’ve spent the last few days being hammered by all of these silly training sessions.” Her thumb brushes away more tears, and then Blue tilts her head and Pink can see that Blue is crying too, tears following the path of her smiling lips. “How was it? I know you were worried about it. As scary as you feared?”

“Okay,” Pink rasps, unsteadily. “White sang these weird French lullabies pretty much the entire time and I was practically on her lap. The air flight lady kept glaring at us.”

Blue chuckles. “She does that. Did I ever tell you about when I was learning to drive? The first time White was in the car with Yellow and I, I was so nervous, but White just completely ignored me and started singing instead. It was actually quite calming.”

“Yeah,” Pink says. “She’s really good.”

Blue shrugs one shoulder. Her hands steadily move through Pink’s hair, untangling the knots and brushing it with her fingers. In increments, Pink calms. They lapse into slightly awkward silence, holding each other’s hands.

At last, Blue sighs and says, “I almost can’t believe you’re finally here.”

“I…” Pink blurts, and then falls off. She swallows and blushes. “I can’t. Really. Either. I keep thinking I’m gonna wake up and be back there, or that you’ll all decide that I’m not really-“ She stops herself, mortified.

“I felt the same way when White agreed to come meet me,” Blue confesses. “She’d already met Yellow some time beforehand, but the whole way there I was scared she would take one look at the wheelchair and run for it.”

“That’s stupid,” says Pink. “You being in a wheelchair doesn’t matter. Well – I mean – you know what I mean.” She stops again, frustrated. Blue laughs.

“I do. But White stayed for me, and we’ll stay for you, Pink. Now we’ve found you, you’re going nowhere.” In the half-light from the door, Pink could see Blue’s lips pull up into another smile. “Yellow will be _ecstatic_ to have someone else to check up on. Between her and White, it’s like having mother-hens for partners.”

Pink’s heart swells bruiselike and big with love, and she grips Blue’s hand hard. “That’s okay,” she says. “I – don’t mind. I – I think I love you. Them. All of you.”

“Maybe not yet,” Blue says, kindly. “We hardly know each other properly. I’d like to learn to love you, Pink.”

“Oh,” says Pink. “Can – can we do that?”

“We already are.”

Pink holds Blue’s hand as tightly as she dares. Blue strokes her cheek, then leans back, politely. Pink fidgets, her eyes darting down at their overlapping fingers in the darkness. She musters all her courage. 

“Will you stay?” Pink asks, breathlessly. "Tonight? With me?"

Blue’s dark eyes soften, and she opens her mouth to reply.

“Blue?” Yellow calls quietly from down the corridor, interrupting Blue’s response. She appears in the doorway, dressed in her pyjamas, shorts that leave most of her thighs bare and a spaghetti-strap top. “Blue – where – oh, Pink. You’re… awake.”

“Of course I’ll stay,” Blue says. “Yellow will too.”

Yellow blinks, looking slightly taken aback, but even as Pink hurries to say that Yellow is under no obligation, Yellow shrugs and accepts Blue’s decision with apparent equanimity. Pink tries not to be obvious about staring at the roll of Yellow’s muscled shoulders, the practised tense and flex of her body as she walks over. By Blue’s slight, amused smile, Pink realises she has failed.

“You alright with me in the bed?” Yellow asks. “It’ll be a squeeze with all three of us, but Blue can’t go on the floor.”

“Uh,” says Pink. “Sure?”

Yellow nods shortly, and with impossible tenderness turns to Blue and helps her from the wheelchair, peeling back the covers and helping Blue undress. Pink watches, feeling absurdly voyeuristic as Yellow helps Blue lift her hips to slide her skirt off, replacing them with a soft cotton pair of sleeping trousers. Blue’s legs look thin and wasted, like sticks instead of limbs. At last, when they are all ready, they pile into the bed, Yellow on one side, Blue on the other, Pink nervously in the middle.

There is a pause, and Pink almost jumps, staccato panic racing down her spine, when Yellow’s hand fumbles over her hip, but then she relaxes when Blue’s hand immediately reaches across Pink and they join hands over her stomach, their partnership a warm, comforting weight on her belly. Pink swallows and feels an unexpected burn of tears in her eyes. She blinks furiously. Yellow shifts and sighs, comfortably, her body radiating warmth and peace. Suddenly, it’s impossible to think of Herr Fischer – her body is incredibly aware of the long line Yellow’s heat against her back, and Blue’s soft head, her hand on Pink’s cheek. There is nowhere Pink can go – wriggling only pushes the two of them closer together against her, like she is trapped in the inexorable force between two helplessly attracted magnets.

“How’s this?” Blue asks her, shifting her head on the pillow so she can look into Pink’s eyes. “Better than before?”

“Yeah,” Pink says roughly. Shyly, she rests one hand on top of Blue and Yellow’s joined hold. “T-Thanks.”

 

Blue smiles. “Go to sleep,” she says. “We’ll be here when you wake up.”

And in only a few hours, White will be there to wake them up early by yanking the curtains open to the summer sun with plenty of tart comments about being uninvited, hot coffee (Yellow), warm tea (Blue), a glass of lemonade (Pink), the promise of breakfast on the stove downstairs and a teasing frown that doesn't quite hide the smile in her eyes as she chivvies them, groaning their unwillingness, out from the lazy tangle of limbs in the bed. But for now, there is only peace, and quiet, and an eventual, gentle slide into sleep.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Company](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11586741) by [unquenchable_flame](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unquenchable_flame/pseuds/unquenchable_flame)




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